d her lavish hand
And fairest flowers displayed,
'Twas his to taste of sunny joys,
'Twas mine to sit in shade.

"Oh, talk not to me of a lasting devotion!
It shrivels, it ceases, it fades and it dies.
In the heart of a man 'tis a fleeting emotion;
Alas, in a woman eternal it lies!"

A poet would have said that anyone capable of writing that was incapable
of feeling, but he would have been wrong.

Sometimes Henrietta used to have a phantom lover like the phantom friend
of her childhood, but now--had she more or less imagination as a
child?--she could not bear it. She imagined the phantom, and then she
wanted him so intensely that she had to forget him. The aspect of
certain days would be connected with some peculiarly mournful moments.
She wondered which was the most depressing, the dark setting in at four
o'clock and leaving her seven hours of drawing-room fancy work (for it
disturbed her mother if she went to bed before eleven), or the summer
sun that would not go down.

If only some kind stroke of misfortune had taken away all Mr. Symons'
money. Disagreeable poverty would have been a great comfort to her. She
would have been forced to make an effort; not to brood and concentrate
herself on her misery. But Mr. Symons, on the contrary, continued to get
richer, and throughout her fairly long, dull life, Henrietta was always
cursed with her tidy little income.

But interminable as the time seemed, it passed. It passed, so that
reading her old journal with the record of her happy month, she found
that it had all happened five years ago, and was beginning to be
forgotten. She felt as if it had not happened to her, but to some
ordinary girl who had ordinary prosperity. At the same time her lot did
not seem so bitter as it had done; she had become used to it. Though she
herself hardly realized it, and certainly could not have said when the
change had come, she was not now particularly unhappy. It was an
alleviation that her mother was more of an invalid, so that some of the
responsibilities of the household devolved on her, and her mother
leaned on her a little. She was certainly not the prop of the house, or
the lodestar to which they all turned for guidance, none of the
satisfactory things women are called in poetry, but she was not such an
odd-man-out as she had been.

CHAPTER V

And now the even course of Henrietta's life was interrupted. Evelyn
returned home. She and h